[APPLAUSE]
I'll just read two more things, a brief passage
from Crossing the Yard.
This is 30 years as a prison volunteer.
I'm now working in the federal prison, which
is a big improvement over the state, which
I've been in for 35 years.
This is just a little passage.
It goes back to Florence.
I started in Florence, which was then
the only prison in the state, on death row in the '70s,
early '70s, and then moved into the general population.
And I was at Florence eight or nine years, I guess.
Florence has a way of haunting people.
It always haunted me.
And I've talked to several other people.
One of my ex-students wrote back and said,
years later-- he'd been out for years,
had been teaching in college, as a matter of fact.
He said, I live in this apartment and I feed the dogs.
And I come here and I sleep.
But I know I still live in Florence.
He couldn't get out of it.
OK.
This is after I have left Florence
and have started up workshops down here, outside of Tucson.
Most people aren't aware that there are seven state prisons
and three federal prisons just off Wilmot, just
off the freeway, but out of sight, pretty much.
"I have not been inside the Arizona State Prison
at Florence since I met for the last time with the workshop
I directed there from 1974 to 1980,
although I have stayed in touch with several of the men
from that workshop.
When I try to remember what it was like at Florence, what
comes back to me, other than the faces
of the men in the workshop, are the sounds and the silence.
Florence was a place defined by the almost unbearable noise
of confined life and the prophetic silence of death.
I remember both its noise and its silence.
Sometimes at night, when I was crossing
the deserted main yard, it was so still I
could hear the coyotes howling in the desert
outside the prison, howling as if in pain.
Then a guard's laughter would flare
like a match flame from the parapet on the wall above,
and the silence would return.
A listening, waiting kind of silence,
expecting to be shattered by a gunshot, a cry, a siren,
or the clang of the huge metal gate behind me
as I left for the night.
Once I was taken into cell block 2.
I don't remember why I was taken there or who took me.
Perhaps it was a little private tour
some member of the administration was giving me.
Such things were not unusual in those days.
Although it does seem that I had a particular destination
in mind, and that I stopped at a specific cell
and talked to a specific inmate.
But I have no recollection of which inmate.
All I remember is the noise.
It was as if I were inside some huge drum,
being pounded on mercilessly.
I was in shock because of the noise
that struck me in the face as soon as I walked in,
like the 110-degree heat strikes me in the face in August
as it bounces off the Tucson sidewalks.
I felt assaulted, as if by some huge animal
who was pressing against me, sucking all the air out
of my lungs and squeezing my head between its terrible paws.
I had never before experienced noise like that.
CB2, as it is called, is a tall, austere building
with considerable dignity when seen from the outside.
It could house a London bank.
The prison folklore says that it was a monastery
before the rest of the prison was built
around it in 1908 and 1909.
But the official history says it was built in 1932.
It has good lines and good proportions with tall windows.
I had passed it many times and thought that it looked out
of place, neoclassical, surrounded
by other nondescript structures.
From the outside, I could hear a kind of low roar coming
from it, but I was completely unprepared
for the noise level inside.
It is actually a large concrete cage, divided
into many smaller metal cages.
It has three tiers of cells with metal bars across the front
of each cell and catwalks running around the upper two
levels.
Hundreds of televisions and radios
were blaring on dozens of different channels
and stations.
The clang of metal on metal was deafening.
Men were shouting to each other in several languages,
having to shout to be heard over the din.
Several men were trying to play guitars, no two the same songs.
Toilets were flushing.
Men were cursing, laughing, singing.
Everything in CB2 that isn't concrete
is metal, except the inmates and their bedding.
The sounds ricocheted off nearly every surface.
There was a metal railing around the catwalks,
but not high enough to prevent depressed or despairing inmates
from diving off the upper tiers to their deaths
on the concrete floor below.
One of the men in the workshop told me about a time
when that happened.
He said they were marching along the catwalk and down the stairs
to go to chow when everything went silent
after somebody shouted, 'Look!
Up there!
It's Joey!'
Then the only sound was the sound of a guard's boots
on the metal floor of the catwalk,
running toward Joey, who was balanced
on the railing along the top tier, his feet dangling
in space.
Then one clear voice screamed from the other side of the cell
block, high and hysterical.
It could have been the voice of a woman,
but there was no woman in the old monastery that day.
"Go for it, Joey!"
And without a word, he did.
Some of the men looked away from the body and the pool of blood
spreading out from it on the concrete floor.
Others couldn't, and stared as if hypnotized,
as they were herded past on their way to chow."